works of wanderlust

what’s in a name

I have been inching towards some contracting work. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed and in many ways I’m five steps ahead of myself here, but ultimately, all things being equal, my end game in this adventure is to start doing this kind of thing on the regular and actually get paid for it.

I’ve officially taken a stab, and its an optimistic one, but if I’m being honest wih myself not even really a favourable one.

That said, my guide on this adventure did politely inform me that if things proceeded to the next step I would need to do something much more than personal introspection: I would need to set up a business. Legit. Corporate registry, tax account number, bank account, government filing documents, legit.

Not a big deal. It’s just time and money and effort. I can handle it.

But what’s got me hung up is that when I do all that legit business stuff, I actually need to call myself something. I can’t just hang an Inc off my name and go from there. I need a business name.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve been good at naming stuff, but I’ve certainly been prolific. I have registered dozens of domain names over the years and let nearly as many lapse, each a little project or business idea that I threw against the wall hoping it would stick. I have created funny and clever handles for social media accounts. I have given myself an artistic pen name and am currently writing a video game under a clever (and unregistered) studio name, though neither of those really encompass the tone of professionalism that I would hope to impart with a corporate registration name that someone would need to put on an invoice, you know?

And is my way, I tend to trudge along with the bigger plan, ever forward, even while swatting at the air as it buzzes around me with these pesky little problems that need solving.

What’s in a name? Everything, in many ways.

All those previous names I have mentioned were chosen to impart a sense of casual disconnectedness from my professional self, as odd as that might seem. I wanted to add a jagged edge to my art when I called myself “squwetchy” online for that. I used the name “pixelazy” for my photography for a while throwing a broad tone of just-a-guy-with-a-camera snapping photos into the digital ecosphere. My online coder-guy presense has always been wrapped in this very domain name “8r4d” a kind of throwback to the geekily trend of numeric hacker lingo that I secured in a domain name nearly a quarter century ago now. All of them are little slivers of me, but none are my professional self, and none of them convey a kind of marketable trust that even I would look at and go “let’s hire them…”

So I have entered the realm of needing to tangle myself up with a very official, very long term, corporate identity. And I find myself thinking I may need to do that sooner than later. Even inching towards something might get you there eventually, right?

May 8, 2025
obscurity by design

Blogs tend to get looped in with a broader definition of “social media” –and that is fair, to a point–but there is a much more modern attitude around social media fatigue and frustration to which that inclusion I may be less inclined to agree.

I am going to write something that may make your eyes roll into the back of your head: I deleted Facebook. Seriously. But here’s the part where you can stop thinking of it as performative righteousness: I deleted Facebook over five years ago and have not looked back. People send me links and I ignore them. I am told someone sent me a message that I didn’t respond to there, and I say I have not logged in in years. Folks suggest I should check the online marketplace or visit their community page or whatever, whatever, whatever, and I shrug and tell them the same as I just wrote for you above: I deleted Facebook.

This is a complex topic, social media.

Our whole world seems to revolve around a handful of little corporate micro-blogging platforms that steamroll through the barriers to entry but, like a set of tire spikes at the entrance, create a troublesome blockade to escape again.

So then that’s the thing. A lot of people “perform” the little notion that they have escaped social media apps, but like abandoning your car and walking out of a lot with tire spikes at the gate, you haven’t really deleted Facebook if your account is still there. You haven’t left Twitter if you could log back in and pick back up on whim. You haven’t escaped the doomscroll of Tiktok if you offload the app from your phone.

I started blogging in 2001 and created my own little platform upon which I heaped countless hours of effort to write and post and share and converse. All of this was before the apps we know as social media were even twinkles in their tech bro’s thirsty eyes. And I write about it now because I am walking a fine line between grumpy old man yells at cloud (services) and clear-eyed neo-luddite looks at a world consumed by unidirectional experiences driven by inhuman algorithms that are literally destroying our society–and every day I feel like I need to say something.

So, when I write that blogs tend to unfairly get looped in with social media what I mean to tell you is that sure, blogs are a kind of spiritual older sibling to the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, but maybe more of an older step-sibling, born of a different first marriage between society and technology, built and nurtured in a more innocent time, still problematic and ripe for potentially harmful communication, but far less wild and spoilt by their parents bitter fighting. Blogs are related, but they shouldn’t just be looped in with the other kids.

I tend to fumble over to analogy when I am stabbing around for my point.

I deleted Facebook but I re-invigorated my blogging because there is something deeply toxic that is being nurtured on those social media platforms that is a little more under control on a private blogging site.

I suppose we could deconstruct this a little more technologically.

What is a blog?

I have built so many now that I take it for granted, but essentially your modern blog, like this very one you are reading, is a giant database of text and images stored on a web server. I log into a piece of blogging software, in my case WordPress, which opens up into a friendly screen that invites me to do all sorts of things: manage my design, check the health of the site itself, change my account or add another user, and probably most importantly add or edit content. I can open a little word processor, type and type and type, upload images, add links and tags and a hundred other little design flourishes. And the big database behind that system keeps track of what I made, stamps a date on it, and let’s me push a publish button that sets that post I made to be visible to the public. All of that means that when you load up my blog, in a fraction of the second the blogging software goes into that database and shows you a reverse chronological list of everything I have created and made public. In my case that means you get a reverse chronological listing of (as of right now) a couple dozen long-winded, text-heavy personal essays with a smattering of photos and images. All of that is stored in a database I control, on a server that I pay for access to use, and no one but me–absolutely no one else–has any control over what appears here so long as I don’t break the rules of the hosting company or the laws of the land.

You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound too different from, say, Facebook and you’d be right… to a degree.

What is a social media app, then?

Well, a lot of that stuff about databases and content uploading and profile management is actually pretty similar to a blog. You log into a piece of software that lets you write something, add pictures or video or links, drop in some hashtags, and press the equivalent of a publish button. But that’s about where the similarities start to diverge. This will be a simplification because (a) every platform is a little different and (b) a lot of this stuff is hidden, secret and proprietary to those companies. But just like me, those companies are managing a piece of software on a piece of technology infrastructure, it is simply a matter of scale. And just like what happens when you visit this site and the database and software work together to build you something to read and view and interact with, those platforms do the same. But where mine is simple and reverse chronological, those platforms have introduced something that we so often hear referred to as The Algorithm. All this means is that rather than a tidy ordered list of the stuff people post fairly, simply, democratically laid out like how I do in my blog, countless factors–from what the company wants you to see to what they think will keep you reading to what they think you might click on to buy, and the list goes on–weight into the order in which the software generates something for you to look at. And that’s it. That’s the difference… and in many ways it’s all the difference in the world.

You will not be surprised to learn that not that many people read this website. I don’t have much visibility or profile on this big wide internet now dominated by a handful of massive corporate interests. Almost one hundred percent of the users of the internet (statistically speaking, of course) feed their time and energy scrolling through outputs of the software created and curated by Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. And you go on these sites, you are entertained (by design) and you never leave… but you roll your eyes at the kinds of people who try to step away. And like trying to drive backwards through the tire spikes, most who try are unsuccessful.

And then we yell at each other, on those very sites, trying to understand why we feel the way we do about them. Why do we feel empty. Why do we get enraged so easily. Why do we feel drained and broken and mentally bloated from the experience.

I’m not going to sit here and write that there is any one reason, but I would contend that it comes down to something in the difference between a blog and Facebook feed… in which at the same time I would contend there is simultaneously very little difference, yet all the difference in the world.

Whenever someone loops an effort for someone, anyone, to maintain a blog into the social media categorization that talks about the decline of the internet, whenever I hear that, I shudder. And I go write a post about it that you may never read, but which will be right here waiting for you in the exact spot where I put it, not promoted by an algorithm with an agenda, nor hidden by anything but my own obscurity.

May 7, 2025
pi day

May fifth is definitely not pi day, that annual nerdy celebration of a happy mathematical confluence between the calendar and one of the worlds favourite pastries, pie. Normally the geeky among us celebrate with an extra helping of dessert on March fourteenth: three fourteen. Three one four.

May fifth is, however, something of an anniversary for me relating to pi day.

See, in 2016, leading into that year’s pi day, I checked to see if anyone had ever bothered to register the piday.ca domain name, found it unclaimed, and placed my stake on the little piece of digital real estate.

I had plans, and like many half-baked ideas it made a little progress before sputtering out. I wanted to make a website celebrating pi day, but I just couldn’t think of anything more clever to do with it besides essentially creating a brochure for this obscure, silly math celebration.

One year later, pi day came and went and I tracked a few hits to the domain but nothing of consequence.

But I had been working on another project at the same time: I had been designing and writing and drawing a web comic that I was pulling together under the name of “This Dad’s Life” which was a kind of kids-say-silly-things and fatherhood snapshots in cartoon form. But I didn’t really like the name, to be honest.

I wonder if he’ll mention the dad guy character. I remember that guy. Handsome fellow.

Then pi day 2017 came around and the kid said one of her trademark silly things: she told me she liked pi day because it was dad joke holiday. She was nine at the time and threw herself into dramatic fits of jovial groaning every time I pulled out one of my trademark dad joke puns. Pi day wasn’t just a geeky holiday, it was a punny celebration and the pinnacle of oddness that any dad-joke loving parent could celebrate with their kids.

And I had this domain name I wasn’t really using for anything.

I renamed my comic effort to “This is Pi Day” winking at the parenting tangent that the observations of my kid had brought into focus, and on May 5, 2017 published my first strip of nearly two hundred to that domain name. Eight years ago today.

I wrote and drew that comic for about three years. The schtick got old, the kid got older and became less a silly kid and more a clever teen, which was great for me in reality but terrible for my content inspiration. The pandemic happened, and… well… maybe not a half-baked idea but it sputtered out regardless.

I still own the domain name, largely because I signed up for a bunch of social media and other support accounts using an email based on it. And because I printed cards that I handed out with it on there. And too, because I stamped it into the corner of every comic I drew.

Every once in while I dig out a strip from my archives and share it, explain it, but for a while I was just a guy with a comic strip online and a couple hundred fans. And every May 5th another reminder comes up in my calendar that This is Pi Day was today.

May 5, 2025
book reviews: may the forth

(…be with you!)

It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

Wool by Hugh Howey

A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.

May 4, 2025
derailed

I’ve been tiptoeing around the realities of my recent detour into part time work partly because I was trying to keep myself sane and partly because I was trying to avoid offending anyone there who may have stumbled upon this blog.

No one ever did, of course.

But as I’ve written a couple times now, I recently quit that job. I quit so recently, in fact, that I’m technically still just “between shifts” as far as my regular schedule there went. It hasn’t sunk in. It hasn’t had time to sink in. I still reflexively checked the app this morning to make sure I wasn’t missing something… you know, before that first coffee kicked in.

But I’ve been sitting here thinking about the whole thing and feeling a lot of regret. I’ve been sitting here thinking how agreeing to go back for a second round was a big mistake.

It wasn’t the people. First off, let me put that down.

But here’s the backstory: Last August I decided I wasn’t quite ready to go back and get a real job, or at least I was still romanticizing the notion of a larger scale shift in my career, so I was dabbling. I thought maybe I’ll dabble in the retail grocery industry and see where it takes me for a bit. I promptly found myself working for a local small business that was expanding in our community and (insert complex business mumbo jumbo here) I got a part time gig helping build that out, launch it, and work in it. I mean that literally. I literally helped assemble shelves, frantically help customers on opening day, and then physically stumbled through the chaotic warehouse for the first two months of operation. A lot of bullshit decisions got made by people (and I can say that without flinching because when I did go back the new management literally apologized for the conditions under which I ultimately left in December). I walked away the first time, which was a bummer because I had left the little pipe dream behind but also because it was supposed to keep me busy for the cold, cold winter months. I could write for pages and pages about that time (and I have in personal documents) but I simply need to tell you that was the first time I quit.

I did keep busy, tho, for that cold, cold winter.

There are days and days of cold when you don’t even want to leave the house. You just crank the space heater and wrap up in slippers and a blanket and forget that anything outside exists.

I started work on a video game.

I made serious progress on my novel.

And, more importantly, I went back to school. I signed up for a serious continuing education course program that consisted of seven modules of Business Analyst Certification training involving course work and post-lecture assignments.

And I was doing great.

There is a whole elaborate string of coincidences and conversations that led me back to the grocery store. Promises. Idealized futures. Criss-crossed expectations, mostly.

And so for two and a half months I put an apron back on, resumed making myself available for shift work, and there I was back working. And for the first month (singular) of that back to work time it was great. They had some programs I was supporting. They had big goals for how they, as the third set of management in six months, were going to clean up the store and put it back on the rails. Whatever had happened in those months since we first walked in the building to build the shelves, something had derailed it to near crashing. I was helping, not just literally, but actually making a measurable difference to the success of the store. I had purpose.

So I was back. And it was fine. It was fine. Really. Fine. Until it wasn’t.

Because going back, simply, sadly, frankly, it derailed me.

I’ve been tiptoeing around this. I’ve been writing about my struggles with multitasking and my thoughts on working towards bigger goals, and sure… all of that is true. But the reality of it is that taking on this stupid little low-paying part time job, as much as it was good for my social health and my getting out of the house motivation, it derailed everything that was important to me.

Derailed me hard.

My game development efforts waned.

My writing, save for my reflective blogging, ground to nearly a halt.

My school work measurably suffered as I rushed assignments and squeezed them into the spaces between even just those handful of infrequent shifts.

I arguably gave it too much. I arguably didn’t compartmentalize. I arguably stumbled over my own metaphorical shoelaces and let it trip me up and throw me off. But it all of those things are true and more, too.

The whole experience made me feel lesser. Despondently so. I was seriously becoming borderline depressed at the inertia that this stupid little job was consuming in my life. I would go to a shift, and with each shift it seemed like I had less purpose in the store, futzing around trying to fill my block of paid time with useful tasks that were become increasingly rare as they shuttered programs and made alternate plans to the handshake deals they had blue-skied when I first started, and all while getting yet another day further from the things where I was making real actual progress in my life: professional development, tangible skills, and measurable outputs towards nearing-completed projects. I was selling not just my time, but selling it to the lowest bidder and throwing in my heart and soul all tangled in the mess of it.

At least if I’d donated it I’d have felt good about that part. But selling something for less than it’s worth?! Come on!

The trade off was so imbalanced I can’t even clearly articulate how much it derailed everything that I loved for the uneven trade of time and loyalty and value I was giving to this stupid little store.

You should shop there. I’m not going to name it, but if you know me you know what it’s called. It is a great little local market filled with cool people and almost certainly being run a thousand times better than when I quit the first time. But it was a terrible fit for me. It hurt me. Every bit of momentum I had gathered before that seemed suddenly at risk and arguably been derailed by my hubris in thinking I could go back and work there again without giving too much of myself. And I haven’t wanted to admit that. But it’s true, and unfortunate.

It’s been barely thirty six hours since I last walked out of that place and I’m never going back to work there. There is no third act. But I may wander down there with a laptop and get some real work done, work meant for me and work that has purpose for who I need to be, as I get myself back on track.

May 3, 2025

blog.8r4d.com

I don’t quite know what this site will be yet, but I have this writing itch that needs to be scratched, a yearning that can’t be sated with social media, so I expect I will find an excuse to put words here sooner than later.

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